51 Technologies found

UCLA researchers from the Department of Psychiatry has created a novel cell-based seeding assay for sensitive, specific and high throughput detection of mutant Huntingtin proteins in biological samples.

Cell expansion for cartilage tissue production usually leads to loss of the potential to produce cartilage, which impedes uses for cartilage repair. This invention features methods and systems for producing highly expanded primary cells to construct functional neocartilage and other neotissue. According to a 2015 global market report, tissue engineering technologies are expected to reach over 94B USD by 2022.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are promising as drug delivery carriers because they are inherently biocompatible, It would be desirable to efficiently, specifically, and rapidly change the EVs surface presentation to program the interactions with its target cells. Inventors at UC Irvine have developed a strategy for functionalizing the cellular membranes of EVs with precision and ease.

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a popular technique for amplifying and quantifying minute quantities of DNA. Technologies based on PCR are used for a wide range of applications, including forensics, disease detection, and laboratory tools. Researchers at UCI have developed a device that can implement a novel method for PCR based on voltage cycling as opposed to temperature cycling (the current method for PCR). This allows the device to be much more portable and compact than those currently available.

UCLA Researchers in the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology have developed a simple molecular approach to non-invasively distinguish and isolate human pluripotent stem cells that have reverted from the primed pluripotent state to the native state.

The cGAS-cGAMP-STING pathway is an important immune surveillance pathway which gets activated in presence of cytoplasmic DNA either due to a microbial infection or a patho-physiological condition, including cancer and autoimmune disorders. Sensing 2’3’ cGAMP level is important in diagnostics perspective as well as in basic understanding of their regulation. Small molecule activators of this pathway have also been shown to activate an anti-cancer immune response and thus an important use for pharmaceutical applications. However, a high throughput method to screen for such potential drugs is still not available. UC Berkeley researchers have designed a RNA-based fluorescent biosensor for directly detecting 2’3’ cGAMP. The biosensor was able to detect 2’3’ cGAMP and assay cGAS activity in vitro and thus would be useful for high throughput screening of small molecule modulators of cGAS activity. The biosensor was sensitive enough to quantify 2’3’ cGAMP in dsDNA- stimulated mammalian cell extracts.

Background: Therapeutic delivery of genes is a rapidly evolving technique used to treat or prevent a disease at the root of the problem. The global transgenic market is currently $24B, growing at an annual projected rate of 10%. Currently, a variation of this technique is widely used on animals and crops for production of desirable proteins, but this is a heavily infiltrated market. Thus, entering the gene therapy segment is more promising and would enhance the growth of this industry. Brief Description: UCR Researchers have identified a novel transposon from Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. This mobile DNA sequence can insert itself into various functional genes to either cause or reverse mutations. They have successfully developed a transposon vector system that can be used in both unicellular & multicellular organisms, which can offer notable insight to improve current transgenic technologies as well as methods of gene therapy.

Researchers at UC Irvine have developed a technology to detect the presence of nucleic acid amplification in a droplet. This technology yields real time detection of DNA or RNA amplication in a high throughput integrated microfluidic platform.

The CRISPR/CAS9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated genes) system has been found to be adaptable to nearly every organism studied including mammalian cells, fruit flies, and plants. The broad adaptability of this system has lead in the past year to significant strides in refining the methodology and in the generation of many additional applications. The innovation we propose is based solidly on existing technologies and should work in flies, mosquitos, human cells, and plants.

Guide RNAs are RNAs that guide the insertion or deletion of uridine into mitochondrial mRNAs in the process of RNA editing. They are also an essential component for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-mediated genome editing, which has been widely used to knock out genes in human cells, rodents, zebra fish, C. elegans, Drosophila, yeast, and plants. The earlier methods for guide RNA production in vivo were limited to using U6 and U3 snRNA promoters. There was no reliable and efficient method for producing guide RNA in vitro.

Dr. Benhur Lee and colleagues in the UCLA Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics have developed a novel system to detect and characterize HIV with unprecedented sensitivity and rapidity.

The fate of somatic cells can be reprogrammed to the pluripotent state by the combination of a few transcription factors, resulting in induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). One of the most important aspects of somatic cell reprogramming is the possibility of using iPSCs to model human diseases in order to recapitulate their development, pathology and drug responsiveness. Although the field of iPSCs has advanced significantly in recent years, much still remains unclear in the reprogramming process itself, the differentiation potential of cells and their future use in clinical therapy. Recent evidence suggests that iPSCs can exist in alternative states, which can influence the potential of cells to make different cell types. Thus, it has become critically important to develop an efficient method to identify and isolate these alternative states, which will provide tremendous insights in the reprogramming process and differentiation potential of the cells.

Sequencing based approaches of gene expression analysis generate millions of sequence tags, thus providing the dynamic range required to investigate genes of low abundance. Currently available digital gene expression analysis systems offer the potential for high-throughput transcriptomic measurements, however truly quantitative data are routinely not obtained. The most widely used RNA-seq protocol relies upon fragmentation of mRNA generating a library of uniformly distributed fragments of mRNA. This protocol requires large amounts of starting material (100ng of mRNA) limiting its application in many fields such as in developmental biology, where it is impractical to get such large amounts. Furthermore, this protocol maintains the relative order of transcript expression resulting in poor representation of low abundance transcripts at current sequencing depths. Multireads and biases introduced by transcript length and random hexamer primer hybridization further restrict reliable quantitation of low abundance transcripts for large mammalian transcriptomes. While random priming strategies amplify starting material (mRNA or cDNA) by exploiting hybridization and extension potential of hexamer/heptamer primers, they often result in low yield of good quality reads arising out of mis-hybridization of primers and primer dimerization. In a recent experiment, the inventors used a widely available sequencer to generate sequence tags via random priming strategy. Only 18% of the reads mapped uniquely to the transcriptome and low abundant transcripts were significantly under-represented because of poor dynamic range. Since many genes (signal transduction, transcription factors) are only expressed at relatively low levels, currently available strategies fall short in statistically quantifying these genes.

The 26S proteasome is the macromolecular machine of the ubiquitin proteasome-dependent degradation pathway that is responsible for most of the nonlysosomal protein degradation in both the nucleus and cytosol. It is involved in many important biological processes such as cell cycle progression, apoptosis, and DNA repair. Human proteasome complexes are conventionally purified by ultracentrifugation and multiple chromatographic techniques, which are time consuming and require a lot of materials. A strategy that allows for fast and effective purification of human proteasomes will be an important research tool. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a new affinity purification strategy for rapid and effective isolation of the human 26S proteasome. The 293 cell line is robust and can stably express Rpn11-HTBH. It is a cell line that allows the affinity purification of the human 26S proteasome under both native and denaturing conditions. It allows the purification of the human 26S proteasome complex after in vivo cross-linking.